Cleaner Test

Cleaners, typesetters, editors and redrawers
Tacospartan04
Posts: 1
Joined: Tue Jan 02, 2018 8:12 pm

Cleaner Test

Postby Tacospartan04 » Fri Jan 05, 2018 9:04 pm

Brett: You can credit me as Tacospartan04
Availability: 10 PM-12 PM on Monday-Friday and 12 PM-5 PM on Saturday (UTC-6 or Central Time)
What Manga I'm Interested In: Naruto, Monster Musume, and Osake wa Fuufu ni Natte Kara are some of my favorites. I'd love to work on anything to be honest, however if there is a position for Osake wa Fuufu ni Natte Kara I would love to work on that.
Software: I will be using Photoshop CS2
Experience: I have never done scanlation before, However I am certified in Adobe Photoshop CS6 and I'm An Adobe Certified Associate for Visual Communication (PM me If you'd like to see my Certification)
Link: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B9CxqGvXDFVcflYwaXI3aFRYUzZzd3BEZFFmekpMZ3g4dlpSZExoNVZvNGFpMXZZWFdCZnM?usp=sharing

User avatar
Wraith
Posts: 3367
Joined: Thu Mar 19, 2015 11:58 pm

Re: Cleaner Test

Postby Wraith » Sat Jan 06, 2018 12:14 am

Hi, Tacospartan04, thanks for your application and willingness to join our scanlation group.

I had your test assessed by our Head Cleaner, O.O-Amy, and we have our decision. I'll write a detailed assessment below based on what she said.

First, the good thing. You seem to have a knack for redrawing. Since you've never done scanlation before, let me tell you the difference:

- Cleaning is what this test requires you to do: straightening pages, cropping them to a standard size, levelling blacks and whites with attention to detail and patterns, removing text from bubbles and easy areas, identifying and pre-merging doubles, removing dust and applying any filters you may deem necessary given each case (like PS and Topaz Labs filters).

- Redrawing is actually intervening in the art directly. It consists of mostly two things: removing text from areas where it is superimposed over complex backgrounds, reconstructing the missing art; and merging double pages by redrawing the gap between them.

Some groups have cleaners do both tasks, but several have separate departments for each. We more or less specialise in hard-to-redraw series, so we are the latter. It's the best way to optimise time and use our editors' skills.

So, you needn't have merged pages 1 and 2, or redrawn the Japanese text from off-bubble areas on page 4. Pages 1 and 2 could have been left with a gap in the middle, your duty was just to recognise that they were two halves of a double. But you did redraw all of them, and you did well.

Now, we cannot tell how good a redrawer you could be based on this test because it wasn't designed to test for redrawing. The redrawing opportunity it offers are few, incidental and not particularly hard. So we can only tell that you have an inclination towards it. So you may wish to consider taking our redrawing test, as we are recruiting for redrawers as well. (But be warned: that test is very hard.)

So, back to cleaning.

Unfortunately, you don't pass as of now. I'm going to go into detail page per page, but first I have a few comments that apply to your test as a whole:

i. You shouldn't merge the layers after you finish. Keeping bubble removal, levelling, masks and other layers separate from the background copy layer enables a quality checker to adjust simple things just by changing parameters in the intermediate layers. If you flatten the image, any correction needed will require cleaning everything from scratch.

ii. The rule of thumb for resizing is that you either don't do it (if the raws are already in a size between 1200 and 2400 px height), or you size the pages down (if they are high-resolution raws several thousand pixels high, like page 5, for example). You never size raws up while cleaning, because that blurs sharp aspects of the art and causes you to lose resolution. So it was wrong to resize page 4 and others to 2400 px high when they were smaller than that originally.

iii. You have a tendency to overlevel pictures, especially the blacks. It's a common mistake among beginners. What it causes is loss of detail in dark areas of art. You can see how in page 1, the pattern in the leather gloves in the bottom is partly lost in your cleaned layer, or how the characters' hair becomes less glossy on page 7. Applicants often try to overlevel blacks as a way to reduce the amount of dust they'll have to remove manually with Burn afterwards, but unfortunately, there are no easy solutions: you must preserve the patterns and double down on dusting. Basically, when levelling, look for areas in the pic that have delicate, subtle dark patterns (hair, eyes, the character who has his face in the shadow on page 7…) and only slide the level gauges until right before the value where you begin losing these details. (Also, sometimes no levelling is needed at all. Developing the skill to judge accurately on that is also a must for a cleaner.)

Okay, let's go page by page now: (the section below is in addition to what I said above)

- Page 1+2: merged together and redrawn, but the right half of the page is lighter than the left part so that's not acceptable. And the left part of the page is probably darker because the applicant levelled page 1 before merging them together but forgot to level page 2. Actually, I’m not sure if he dusted the page or levelled it because it could be so that the person literally dusted the white parts of the page clean. It was correctly resized though. The straightening is ok as well.

- Page 3: it got levelled but there seems to be dust there which was not erased. The 1px border on the right was erased and the height is correct.

- Page 4: didn’t get dusted. Wrong cropping (bottom border).

- Page 5: there’s leftover dust (still not sure if the person only levelled all these pages and didn’t do anything of dusting), cropping is ok. Wrong resizing, 2403 instead of 2400. Kinda overlevelled, we can see how the dark pattern of the old soldier in the shadow in the became lost.

- Page 6: second to last bubble wasn’t cleaned. Not dusted. Right side should’ve been cropped to the same amount of white like the left side but that's fine.

- Page 7: not cropped correctly. (The right side has too much white and the bottom should be cropped) It's a bit confusing because it looks kinda dusted but there are some very obvious dust on some places and I’m not sure if it got levelled.

So that's it. All in all, you have some skill, and with some polishing you could become a good cleaner. There are tutorials for cleaning in the Internet, and I can point you to some if you're interested.

If you choose to resubmit after correcting all of the above, we'll be happy to assess your new application.

Good luck!

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